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Obama, Blair, Panetta praise the moral cowards, ignore heroes

by Scholars TruthJustice | April 20, 2009 at 08:34 am

218 views | 14 Recommendations | 2 comments

Psychologist Stephen Soldz has been one of the key voices exposing the American Psychological Association's unwillingness to refuse participation in torture by its members. Soldz is a faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He is also a Steering Committee member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility [PsySR] and has a website called Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice, and a blog called Psyche, Science, and Society.

Obama, Blair, and Panetta praise the moral cowards, ignore the true heroes

by Stephen Soldz

April 20th, 2009

It turned out to be harder than I expected to find the complete texts of the statements made by President Obama, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and CIA Director Leon Panetta on Thursday as the Office of Legal Council torture memos were being released. Thanks to Spencer Ackerman, I have located them and post them here.

I must say that, reading these in their entirety, they are as chilling as the memos themselves. While the memos describe the torture program in meticulous, bureaucratic detail — including the temperature of water to be used to chill people, and the length and number of waterboarding episodes permitted per day — the statements from our President and two of his top officials heap praise upon those who were all too willing to sacrifice their morals and decency in pursuit of this horrific program.

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Fred Miller

at 09:44 on April 20th, 2009

Well.....Obama will have to live this 'heaping of praise' down in order to live up to this part :

' we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again '

Karl Gotthardt - albertacowpoke

at 15:47 on April 20th, 2009

Talk is cheap, whiskey costs money.

Victronix (not verified)

at 16:06 on April 20th, 2009

I really appreciated Stephen Soldz's perspective on this -- who are the real heroes? As he underscores, the real heroes are . . . not the agents of the CIA who carried out the torture, but:

And, perhaps most disturbingly, to absolve and convey hero status to those who shelved their consciences is an insult to the true heroes of this sordid chapter in our history, the many men and women in our military and our government who refused to go along and protested and fought against these acts of state-sponsored horror. For the interrogators who gave up careers spanning decades out of shame over what their profession was being turned into, the JAGs who fought the development of this policy and risked scorn in defending the “worst of the worst,” the prosecutors who denounced the concealing of abuse in the highly politicized trials at Guantanamo, again at the cost of careers, and those officials like Albert Mora who took seriously their obligation to defend the Constitution are real heroes. These are the individuals who deserve the praise of our leaders and our people.